Server Maintenance

I will be preforming some server maintenance starting at about 6:00 PM CDT Friday, December 13, 2013. I have hopes to be done that same night, but depending on how things turn it out, it may be longer.

During this time, I will be updating the server, installing a better spam filter on these forums, migrating server configuration to a new system, and many other miscellaneous things I've been putting off for awhile. During this time, most if not all, domains will likely give a welcome page, appear offline, or a give generic maintenance mode message. Please disregard any messages like this.

I will also likely be bringing a new version of the odyssey website online this weekend. It will likely have a very generic template, but I need to the new backend up for further testing. I hope to have the downloads and the news online (hopefully pulling news directly from the Odyssey subforum so I no longer have to maintain two places) at the same time but I've not coded that yet so give it a week if they aren't.

Finally, if I have time this weekend, I'll be migrating user accounts on this forum to our new login system. When this happens, I will have to invalidate all current user sessions (meaning you will need to re-login) and then I will have two options. I will either have to capture your password when you next login or reset all users passwords so that we can sync up your password with the new logins. I'm probably going to go the mass reset option since it's less hacky and seems a little more trustworthy. Once I've done this, if you've ever played on one of my odyssey servers, you should be able to login to both the forums and our sites with those credentials. I'll still have to come up with a good way to merge accounts with existing forum accounts though..

I spent far too long on a couple of updates, so I'm not quite finished with maintenance. Some things are kind of in limbo, but for the most part, the main site, forums, and our source control are working. I'm sure some things are broken that I haven't noticed yet, but I'll get to those tomorrow. All sites will go totally offline tomorrow around 6:00PM CDT, 14 Dec 2013 for a period of hopefully no more than 2 hours. I'll post here and close this topic when things are settled down.

In the meantime, I've installed a new spam blocking system. We're going to test the waters for a few weeks to see how it holds up against spam bots. So effective immediately, new user restrictions should be totally removed. You should be able to post in any valid forum without post moderation. I probably missed a few areas, but this is just a test to see if the spam plugin holds up against spammers.